You did it, and you are really on your way! You’ve completed the 30 days of your Metabolism Plan, and now you have a really clear idea of what types of foods and exercise are perfect for your body. Better yet, you know how to test any type of food or exercise to find out for sure what works best for you.
This is huge, my dear friends. You are now in control of your weight, and you know exactly how to take charge of your health. The knowledge you have acquired will support you for the rest of your life.
Now, that doesn’t mean the diet and exercise that work today will work forever. After all, your body keeps changing. Maybe today your body likes beef. In a year, your body might tell you, “Enough of beef—I’m ready for some fish!” The following year, you might find you need lamb. It’s a never-ending process of growth and change.
Likewise, today your body might love Pilates. In one year, it might be ready to switch to weight training. The important thing is to keep listening to your body and letting it guide you.
So here’s the best news of all: You are now 100 percent able to do this! How do I know? Because while your body’s needs may change over time, the testing methodology of The Metabolism Plan doesn’t. With this knowledge, you will continue to lose weight until you reach your ideal healthy weight, and then you will be able to easily maintain that weight. For life. I promise.
Now, I often have people ask me, “Do I have to use the scale and take my BBT daily?” The answer is, it’s up to you. I don’t expect most people to keep taking their BBT daily after the 30 days unless they are trying to work on thyroid and endocrine issues that are still unresolved. So maybe just break out the thermometer when you are trying a new sport or doing endurance work, like training for a marathon. You can do the same thing with the scale once you stop testing foods. If you start to notice that your clothes aren’t fitting the way they used to, bring out the scale and start retesting. Or you can just weigh yourself daily as I do. I’m always so intrigued by what my body is telling me daily, and the scale helps me listen. You can choose your own ways of listening, with or without the scale.
To get you ready for full independence, in this chapter I will:
• give you some overall guidelines for creating friendly menus by showing you how to rotate your foods throughout the week.
• tell you what to do if you hit a plateau.
• show you how to respond if you suddenly start gaining weight.
I also want to assure you that if you need any additional help—for any aspect of The Metabolism Plan whatsoever—my wonderful staff and I are always at your service. The Metabolism Plan team is a warm community, and we are always here for you.
Meanwhile, let’s go over the last few things you need to know for now, next year, and the rest of your life.
You’ve tested quite a few foods in your 30 days, but I know you have lots more you want to test. That’s terrific! You’ve got two options.
Option 1: To expand your food choices, test foods every other day.
Option 2: To speed up weight loss, test foods every fourth day.
The choice is yours. Testing foods more often means that you will build up a list of friendly foods faster—foods that you know will help you lose weight and maintain a healthy weight.
Testing foods less often means that for at least three days out of four, you will continue to lose weight. This tends to work better if you have 30 pounds or more to lose. Even so, please keep testing, because you need a wide variety of foods to choose from for your best health and weight. I don’t want you sticking to just a few foods for the next several months, let alone the rest of your life. You’ll get bored, you’ll feel restricted, and you’ll deprive your body of a world of nutrients that might be exactly what you need for optimal health.
By now you are quite familiar with our slogan, “rotate or react”! You can’t follow it, though, unless you have enough foods in your arsenal so that every day you can have 5 to 7 items that you did not eat the day before. Even a friendly food that you’ve been eating for months with no problem can turn unfriendly if you eat it too often, especially if you eat it two or three days in a row. So let’s set some goals to keep you from turning your friendly foods into your enemies:
• Use the animal protein rotation chart here. Your golden rule: Don’t repeat animal proteins two days in a row. Animal proteins are the foods most likely to set off an inflammatory reaction, so we want to be extra careful not to overdo any one of them. Using the rotation chart will keep those friendly proteins friendly!
• Eat any particular friendly grain no more than every other day. Next to animal proteins, grains have the highest chance to be reactive. So don’t overdo them, either. If you enjoy a stir-fry with rice on Monday, don’t have rice again until Wednesday. If you can eat bread, then have it on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. I personally find it easiest to just tag each day of the week with the foods I can have that day—“rice on Monday, Wednesday and Friday; bread on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.” That way I have less thinking and less planning, and my mind is free for more important things—like choosing the right wine!
• Try to never have any vegetable more than three days in a row. Vegetables are probably the least reactive type of food, but I still don’t want you to repeat them too often. Luckily, I’ve got an easy suggestion for you: Make a big batch of sautéed vegetables with no sauce. On the first day, heat it up with a sauté of ginger and garlic. On the second, heat it up and add the Spicy Almond Satay (here). On the third, warm it up and add dill and lemon. Now you’ve also cut down on cooking, which is a major bonus! Then make a new batch of completely different vegetables for your next three days and continue to rotate the sauces.
• Every week, aim for one seed-free day, one dairy-free day, and perhaps one meat-free day. Think Meatless Monday, for example.
These rotation rules may seem complicated now when you’re reading this, but when you do The Plan and see what feels best for you, this is going to be second nature, I promise. It’s not like these are rules you can never break. But the more you follow them, the more you are setting yourself up for success.
Why is rotation so important?
Well, it just so happens that every food contains dozens—maybe even hundreds—of biochemical compounds. The odds are that your body is not going to react well with some of the compounds present in every single food. In other words, even the friendliest of foods have some unfriendly components. These unfriendly components—even in tiny amounts—can be challenging to your body, especially if, like most of us, you are already leading a busy, stressful life and, like all of us, you are living in a world overloaded with industrial chemicals that requires your body to carry a growing toxic burden.
So our goal is to minimize the number of times your body has to metabolize any unfriendly compound. That way, your body can do a better job of digesting and absorbing everything you eat, and you are less likely to develop a food sensitivity.
Here’s your golden rule: Friendly foods will work for you—but they can become inflammatory if you eat them too often. So follow the rotation guidelines here and here (for animal proteins) and here and here (for goitrogens).
Or, if you prefer your golden rules short and sweet:
Rotate or react. (You were expecting that one, weren’t you?)
Okay, so you’ve got your rotations all set up. You know which foods are friendly and which cause you to gain weight, develop symptoms, and otherwise feel lousy. You know which foods you can eat once a week and which foods you can enjoy more often. You’ve got your weekly routine down pat, and it’s really working for you. You’re all set, right?
Well, yes. And no. You can forget about testing foods for a while. But I do want you to retest your friendly foods every 6 to 12 months.
Why? Because, your body keeps changing, which means your foods need to keep changing, too. After all, your body is a dynamic biochemical system that responds with intricate precision to every bite of food, every minute of exercise, every moment of stress. As a complex living organism, you are growing and changing every single day, and that means that your food requirements evolve also.
Some of this is precisely because you are making up for years of being out of balance. Maybe when you started your Metabolism Plan, you were deficient in selenium and iodine, so scallops and cod were your friendly foods. Then, in maybe a year, your selenium and iodine are back in balance, but you need more iron. Suddenly scallops and cod become unfriendly, while steak and lamb are exactly what your body wants.
Or suppose you’ve just been through a significant crisis. Maybe someone you loved was ill, or you had to undergo surgery. There’s a major stressor on your poor body, which has to struggle harder to meet those new demands. Well, guess what? Prolonged stress—whether physical (surgery, illness) or psychological (issues at home or work)—increases your body’s metabolic needs. In response to stress, your body wants more vitamin A, C, D, E, and B complex, as well as more minerals, including potassium, magnesium, calcium, selenium, zinc, and chromium. These different needs might well shift your body’s definition of friendly and unfriendly foods.
Your dietary needs will always be in flux. Thanks to your diligent work, you now have the tools to understand exactly what your body needs at different times so that you can keep up with your fabulous, ever-changing body.
So, you’ve figured out your friendly foods and you’re sailing along, losing weight like a rock star. All of a sudden it seems really hard to lose weight. And you just happen to have seasonal allergies. Hmmm… Did you know that heightened levels of histamine (and many of the over-the-counter drugs you take for them) can turn you into a weight-gain machine? So what can you do? Slow down your testing. If you were doing well testing two to three times per week, drop down to once a week until things settle down. And if you have a solid food rotation with plenty of friendly foods, then don’t test at all until you calm things down a bit.
You’ve already read about MSM (here). For a typical client with seasonal allergies, I recommend starting a six-week course of MSM before allergy symptoms even begin. If you can’t manage that, just start when you can and continue for six weeks. You can also add MSM back in any time you notice allergy symptoms start to flare. I’m happy to report that many clients—and me, too!—don’t need MSM nearly as often as they thought they would. It seems as though once MSM helps repair your mucosa, the effect of seasonal allergies is greatly mitigated.
Here are your recommended guidelines for MSM.
• If you weigh up to 180 pounds: 3,000 mg/day.
• If you weigh up to 240 pounds: 4,000 mg/day.
• If you weigh more than 300 pounds: 5,000 to 6,000 mg/day.
Boy, do I see this one a lot. My patients are so thrilled to find The Metabolism Plan after all those failed diets that they want to just keep on with their friendly foods and avoid everything that didn’t work the first time. Ditto with exercise. After all that work, why mess with success?
I’ll tell you why. When you lose a large amount of weight, you have created huge beneficial shifts in your body. Your entire biochemistry is different. You’ve probably corrected some nutritional deficiencies, but your thinner body also just wants and needs different things than the body that was 50 pounds heavier.
So once you have been on The Metabolism Plan for three to six months (the normal time it will take to lose 50 pounds), you should retest. I typically see at least two or three staples that were once your best weight-loss foods suddenly stop working.
Do you need to redo the cleanse when you redo your Plan? The good news is, not unless you want to. You can definitely restart with day 3 and have coffee and wine, but do give chocolate and salt a break on this day.
I know it’s scary to test new foods when you may want to keep losing weight, but I am telling you this as a friend. Retest your foods every 50 pounds, and you will keep losing weight and achieve your best health.
By now you’ve probably guessed the four reasons most people hit plateaus:
• They haven’t followed the rotation guidelines.
• They haven’t retested their foods.
• They aren’t hitting their protein counts.
• They aren’t exercising in a way that’s right for their body.
Just as doing the same workout week after week can cause your progress to come to a screeching halt, so will eating the same foods week after week. So keep remembering to switch it up with both food and exercise.
What you should not do if you hit a plateau is cut back on how much you eat or step up the exercise (both can create more stress). Follow the portions given in The Metabolism Plan, and do not increase exercise.
There’s a very good reason why this might happen, and why I don’t want you to worry about it. If you’re reading this book, you’ve probably been trying really hard to get to a good weight, for several years or maybe even all of your life. Many people attempt weight loss by beating up their bodies through over-exercise, severe calorie deprivation, or both.
Well, as you now know, stress has taught your body to hold on to weight as a defense mechanism. After all, your body’s main goal is to keep you alive. When you program it to think that it will always need a reserve to live off—either because food is scarce or because a lot of exertion is in store—then your body will helpfully try to hold on to your fat for dear life.
So if you have a long history of undereating or have done “deprivation diets,” you might well hit a plateau as your body panics and starts preparing for hard times again. I see it in my clients all the time. What I suggest is just go through all 30 days on The Metabolism Plan—but don’t cut out foods from the days your weight stays the same, just on the days you gain. By the time you go through all 30 days, your body will start to trust you again and know the famine isn’t coming. You can always retest foods later on.
The worst thing you could do would be to start cutting calories, so please keep eating all your portions. Eating less food or ramping up the exercise to an excessive point will only keep this cycle going, dooming you to a lifetime of starvation plus weight gain—the worst of both worlds! Remember, if you are confounded by your data, you can always work with me or one of my staff! (See the Resources section.)
Basically, though, you just need to give your body a chance to realize that the famine is over and the excess stress is gone. When your body trusts that it no longer needs to guard against unhealthy challenges, you’ll see the weight loss you’ve been looking for.
Okay, confession time. This happens to everyone, even me, for one simple reason: We haven’t retested our friendly foods.
Once you reach your goal weight, you should stay there—if you follow the rules. So if you are one of those rare people who actually does that—if you retest your friendly foods every six months, keep your exercise at the level that your body likes, relieve excessive stress, and are ready to refine your diet as your body changes, you will not gain weight.
If, however, you coast along with your friendly foods and forget about retesting them, you might start to gain weight, because, sooner or later, one of those friendly foods is going to turn unfriendly.
So if the weight starts to pile back on, if you start to notice that your energy or digestion isn’t what it’s supposed to be, you can bet that either your food or your exercise has become unfriendly. Use your trusty scale and thermometer, retest your friendly foods and current exercise routine, and figure out what exactly has just stopped working. Now that you have those tools, you never have to feel like you’re sliding down a slippery slope. You are in charge. Always.
The last time I gained some mysterious weight was about four years ago. For years, my friendliest protein, aside from chicken, had been lamb. Lamb is such a great versatile protein. I could make a large batch of lamb burgers for me and my husband, Bill. I could prepare lamb meatballs for the kids. And all of these dishes could be made up in big batches ahead of time and defrosted at the last minute for a quick and easy dinner. For a busy working mom, lamb’s nickname seemed to be Problem Solved.
Well, guess who started to notice they were putting on a little weight? You guessed it: yours truly. And of course I was blaming the fun things, thinking that the problem was too much bread, chips, or cheese.
However, I did notice the one constant seemed to be lamb, so I retested it. And yes, the next day, I gained 0.6 pound.
I couldn’t believe it! Not my beloved lamb! We still had three or four lamb dishes waiting for us in the freezer. It was so my golden protein—I just had to test it again! So I did—and gained 0.8 pound. My body was speaking loud and clear: Don’t eat this now.
So lamb and I had to break up. But guess what I was able to bring into rotation? Two proteins that hadn’t worked in years: wild white-fish and venison. And now, two years later, guess which protein is working again? You got it—lamb!
Over your lifetime, you can always maintain a healthy weight with the foods that you love. You just need to take a break sometimes.
We talked about this in Chapter 2, but it bears repeating: Iron, iodine, and B12 are all essential for a healthy thyroid, and it’s hard to get enough of those nutrients on a vegetarian or vegan diet. In your case, supplements might be the way to go, although you’ve got some food choices as well.
Iodine, which is essential for proper thyroid function, can be found in kelp, which you can add in the form of a seasoning. I like Maine Sea Seasonings, Kelp or Dulse, which comes in shaker form so you can sprinkle a little on your soups or vegetables. It runs only a few dollars and is regularly tested for toxins. Seaweed, alas, though highly nutritious, can also absorb toxins, so if you go this route, make sure you get it only from cleaner waters.
B12 is essential for absorption of iron, as well as for thyroid health and a healthy nervous system. Vegans and vegetarians can have a tendency toward anemia, because it’s hard to get sufficient B12 and iron from plant foods alone. So you might want to test nutritional yeast (a stellar source of B12) or supplement with B12 and iron. Many iron supplements cause constipation, but two brands I like that don’t are Ferrochel and Floradix. Floradix is in liquid form and is mildly sweet, making it really easy to add to pancake and cookie mixes if your kids are low in iron, too.
I am so happy you now have your personalized approach to weight loss and health, because nobody, and I mean nobody, knows your body better than you. Not the most brilliant doctor, not your mom—nobody. All these years you have been doing “the right thing” or avoiding “the wrong thing,” and it just wasn’t working. Now you finally have the tools to understand what is happening to your body, every single day. On some level, you always knew exactly what you needed. I’m just helping to shine the light and deciphering a few things.
You’ve just spent 30 days figuring out your chemistry—and what a great beginning! This will be a lifelong journey, because that’s what life is, yes? The only constant is change, and the one thing you can be sure of is that you will always have the opportunity to learn something new tomorrow.
Actually, there is one other thing you can be certain of: As long as you practice the principles of The Metabolism Plan, you can maintain a healthy weight, eating the foods your body loves and enjoying your life. You deserve the best, and I’m so happy to have helped you find your answers.